I think my default writing style is reasonably conversational—until I put it to the test. Sometimes it sounds way different out loud than it looks on paper. This normally would not be a problem, because everyone expects writing to be a bit more formal. But there are times when it is critical that you should write for the ear and not the eye.
It’s especially important when you’re crafting a value proposition to start a sales call, or to leave a voice mail for a prospect that will get them to call you back. It’s not too hard to sound spontaneous, and it’s not too hard to sound clever, but trying to do both at once takes work. That work comprises three activities: thinking, writing, and saying.
Obviously, you need to start by thinking what the gist of your message is going to be. But a lot of salespeople stop right here. It sounds good in their head, so they’re confident they can wing it come showtime.
From my own long experience in personally botching unprepared statements plus coaching thousands of role plays, I’ve come to firmly believe in writing it down, because often you don’t know what you think until you try to write it out, and the process of writing and re-writing helps you refine and improve it. That’s where the clever part comes in.
The next step is to make it sound spontaneous. Why is spontaneity important? Because it’s more believable if it sounds natural and effortless. If it sounds like pre-prepared words read off a sheet of paper, you wonder if the speaker believes them himself. People want to feel like you’re talking to them, not at them.
So the third step is to test it by saying it out loud. Skip that step and you may run into a situation that once happened to me, when I called a sales VP at a prospect company to get an appointment. I gave him a beautifully written value proposition, with an exquisitely crafted sentence that contained a plethora of multisyllabic words, and then waited for his reply. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “I didn’t understand a word you just said.”
I think of that story every single time before I make a sales call, which is actually how I got the idea to write this post just now. Just a few minutes ago I prepared for a call to a prospect, and I wrote out a nice value proposition. Then I read it out loud, and the good news was, it didn’t completely stink. But then I said it again a few more times—not reading word for word, but repeating the sentiment, until it sounded both clever and spontaneous. Only then did I pick up the phone and make the call. I ended up leaving a voice mail, so I’m not claiming victory just yet, but at least I didn’t hang up the phone wishing I could go back and delete my own message!
New technologies always change the way things are done in some way, but there are some technologies such as 5G that provide such a quantum leap in performance they can totally disrupt the ways your customers currently do things. If you want to keep up, or even better, get ahead of the change, you need to be an expert in exactly how they do things, what may change, and what that will mean to them.
By definition, technology is the application of knowledge for practical purposes. The “practical purposes” that your customers care about are the processes that they use to add value to their customers, and new technologies can affect those processes in three ways. I’ve used examples from health care to make the point, but you can probably substitute almost any industry:
- Improve: take a current process and speed it up, reduce the error rate, raise uptime, etc. In healthcare, for example, 5G can offload computing power from portable medical devices to the cloud, making them cheaper and improving their battery life.
- Change: change the current process in some fundamental way. Ultra-low latency can enable surgery to take place without having the doctor and patient in the same location.
- Replace: enable totally new processes. In health care, predictions are that the share of spending will shift from treatment to prevention, diagnosis and monitoring. These are the hardest to predict. Who knew that digital photography would spawn selfie sticks and Instagram?
As you move up this pyramid, value to the customer increases, but so does the complexity of your sales process. That’s why you should start preparing now to improve, change or replace your own processes—your sales processes.
Here are some question you should start thinking about:
What processes do your customers use to serve their customers and differentiate themselves?
What improvements will you be able to make? How will that affect the quantity and quality of outputs? How will it affect the various inputs into the process? How much time will be saved?
How will those processes change? People taken out of the equation, faster, more reliable, fewer mistakes, new capabilities, etc.
What new processes will the technology enable? What new capabilities will they have?
How will any or all of these changes affect their revenues, costs, and asset investment requirements?
What risks will they face?
What potential unintended consequences do they need to prepare for?
What will those cost them?
What obstacles will they encounter trying to upgrade their processes? Who will be the new/different problem owners? What will they care about? How are they measured?
Who will be most likely to resist the necessary change?
How will your competition (players, differentiators, and strategies) change, and what will you do about it?
What selling skills will you need to learn, develop or reinforce to be able to adapt your sales approach?
I don’t expect that you will know the answers to all or even a majority of these questions, but the sooner you start asking them, the better off you will be when the change starts to happen. And it’s coming soon! In that spirit, I will leave you with one final question:
Will you be a disrupter or a disruptee?
Wouldn’t it be nice if your customer or prospect published a regularly updated instruction manual for what to talk about when you sell to them? One that explained their key goals, their markets, competitive strategies and their financial performance?
You would think that such a manual would be required reading, and it would be snapped up eagerly by all salespeople as soon as it came out, studied assiduously for the slightest changes from the year before, to find new ways you might be able to add value to them.
But unfortunately, the reality is that most of your customers do publish such a manual, and most salespeople don’t take advantage of it. Instead, it’s treated like a literary classic—everybody wants to say they’ve read it but few actually want to read it.
It’s called their annual report (although more and more, public companies are foregoing thick glossy annual reports, relying instead on the 10-K form they are required to file with the SEC), and it should be required reading for every sales professional who hopes to earn the right to hold effective business conversations with high-level decision makers.
Almost every year at this time I write a blog right about this time of year—which is when most 2017 annual reports come out—urging salespeople to read them. But judging from what I see in the classes I teach, most salespeople don’t. And I can actually sympathize with you on that—there’s a lot in there that won’t help you, so the truth is that 90% of what you read will waste your time. But the problem is that you never know which 90% is waste and which 10% is pure gold.
Most salespeople stop digging at the first level, which is the Chairman’s Letter to Shareholders. It’s a good place to glean a few nuggets to ask specific questions or quotes to put into your sales presentation, but almost everyone reads this far, so their customers aren’t exactly impressed.
The second level is much more detailed. It’s the narrative description of the business and risk factors, right at the beginning of the 10-K form. You’ll find a lot of actionable information about markets, competitors, critical success factors and strategies. It may be about ten pages or so, which is a small investment to make.
The third level is where you can find some good stuff that others overlook and impress your customers is what I feel is the “must-read” section of your customer instruction manual: Management’s Discussion of Financial Results. This section tells the story behind the numbers, and it can be a great education on how your customer actually makes money (or tries to), and it can offer clues to unmet needs that you may be able to fill.
I hope and trust that this year my urging will be heeded; before all else fails, read the manual.[1]
The 5G wave is about to hit, and it’s going to disrupt businesses, industries, even entire economies. Every disruption stirs up new winners and losers, and it will be no different with the selling profession. If you sell anything remotely connected to wireless technology, will you be ready?
What is 5G?
5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology, and it’s much faster than 4G. So much so, that it’s a game-changer, offering 10-100x throughput and 1,000x data volumes. That kind of performance increase is going to cause a revolution in what can be done with wireless communication, and hence what can be done by businesses to add value to their customers to generate revenues and profits. From self-driving cars to machines talking to each other to mission-critical applications, it doesn’t mean just doing the same things faster and more efficiently, it means being able to do completely different things, a lot of which no one has envisioned yet. It’s like the difference between a flip phone and a smart phone, or even between a typewriter and a computer.
How will it impact business?
Industry evangelists love to compare 5G to transformative General Purpose Technologies such as the steam engine and the internet, which have such a broad impact that they touch every single part of the economy. But even for those who don’t fully buy into the hype, there is a clear consensus among technologists, economists and business executives that it will have transformative effects on many industries, especially automotive, health care and industrial automation.
At the very least, “…industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities,” according to an economic impact analysis conducted by IHS Markit in 2017. But there’s more to it than that. In that study, they surveyed almost 4,000 business executives and 91% “feel that 5G will enable new products and services that have yet to be invented.”
If you think how much your life has changed personally since the introduction of the smart phone you can extrapolate that change to entire industries. Which industries? Only those who sell a product or service that benefits from the exchange and processing of information—and off the top of my head I can’t think of one that doesn’t.
How will it impact selling?
Change brings both promise and peril. That’s because every major new technology creates a race to the top, as sellers bring fresh innovative consultative approaches to create new value. In essence, they will not only help their customers do things differently, but they will also help them to do different things. And that will change the way their customers buy.
But even though 5G technology is new, salespeople have faced the same challenge before. Network providers, for example, went through it when analog phones were first introduced, then again in the transition to digital. The danger is that sales forces that have come of age during stable markets and have developed complacent and reactive selling habits will at best leave a lot of money on the table and at worst lose business to smarter competitors.
New technologies go through a predictable technology adoption life cycle, and what Geoffrey Moore wrote in 1991 holds true today: “the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.”[1]
The reason it’s so perilous is that many sales forces fall by the wayside on the road to the mainstream market because they don’t adapt their approach. Initial sales to visionaries are fairly easy; they love the technology for its own sake and will come knocking at your door to acquire it, but what works with them does not work with the early adopters, who are looking for a strategic leap forward, and the early majority, who seek productivity improvements.
For sales forces, the promise is that at least for a short time the power pendulum will swing back from buyers to sellers. In stable markets, when you’re asking a company to buy more of the same or some incremental improvement, your buyers are at least as well-informed and tuned in as you are, which is why buyers in recent years have gone more than halfway through their buying process before they even contact a salesperson. By the time salespeople get involved, they’re coloring in lines laid down by someone else: expectations are fairly set and competitive advantage rests on small differences and price cuts. But when technology is new and unfamiliar, and there are very few use cases to learn from, salespeople can paint on a blank canvas—but only if they are talking to the right people.
That’s where the peril lies: talking effectively to the right people. The bigger the change, the higher the decision, and the greater the “business” content of the conversation. If you’re asking your buyers to fundamentally change the way they do business, or radically change a strategy, that’s way above the pay grade of the technology buyer or of procurement. Those decisions have to be made, or at least sponsored, at the highest levels of the company, so salespeople must have the comfort level and the skills to play here.
Those who can describe their products in excruciating detail will find that they are speaking in tongues to business-level decision makers who speak the language of finance and strategic impact. They won’t want to sit through long technical discussions, but they do want to know how you can help them through the inevitable uncertainty they’re going to go through. They know that there will be winners and losers, and they will eagerly speak to those who can make sure they’re on the right side of that ledger.
What can you do to prepare?
You can’t sell a strategic leap forward unless you understand your customer’s business and industry deeply enough to recognize at least the broad outlines of their business strategies, and it’s tough to credibly sell productivity improvements without a working knowledge of the language of business and finance. While you may get materials and support from your company’s marketing and sales enablement functions, there is a lot you can do on your own, even if you don’t have an MBA or a degree in finance.
- Start cultivating relationships at higher levels, or at least go outside your technology and procurement comfort zone. Not only is the view better up there, it’s far less crowded. Just be sure you’re talking about their business far more than about your technology.
- Read your customers’ latest 10-Ks and/or annual reports, and check out their quarterly earnings calls to start finding hooks for your new enhanced capabilities.
- While you may not be able to suggest a breakthrough idea they haven’t thought of, at least you should be able to improve the quality of the questions you ask and be able to hold your own in C-Level sales conversations.
- Learn how to read a financial statement, both to know how your customers are doing and to know how your offerings will affect their scorecards. Study the details of their cash flow engines, so you can make a direct connection to productivity improvements based on effectiveness, efficiency, and speed.
- Get familiar with their key financial ratios so you can express productivity improvements in the terms they pay attention to.
- You may not need to do a differential cash flow analysis by yourself, but at least learn the difference between terms such as payback, ROI and NPV.
- Read a book such as Bottom-Line Selling: The Sales Professional’s Guide to Improving Customer Profits.
Although it’s tough to predict how quickly it will happen, you have very little time to lose. Verizon and AT&T have already announced rollouts in selected markets in 2018. There will be a 5G gold rush, and a lot of money will be made by those who are best prepared to stake an early claim with business decision makers. Will you be ready?
[1] Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, p. 5.
